Embroidery and crewelwork often require the use of short strands of yarn of different sizes, colors or textures. Therefore, it is desirable to sort the strands according to color, length or thickness and temporarily store them in a sorted array. Somewhat similar devices for guiding and separating yarn are known in the art. A typical yarn guide is shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,054,277. Basically, it is a rectangular card having several openings with restricted access arranged along its length. Each opening loosely receives a single strand of yarn so that the device can guide and separate several strands of yarn. Accordingly, this prior device is useful for feeding continuous strands of yarn from spools to a workpiece since it prevents the tangling and crossing of individual yarn strands.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,588,081 shows another similar comb-type arrangement for guiding and separating individual strands of wire with each wire being resiliently clamped in a different slot in a rectangular frame member.
While at first glance these prior guides and separators might seem to be suitable to sort yarn in the manner intended here, in reality they are not satisfactory for this purpose. In the former, strands segregated in a given opening would be bunched and tangled together, making it difficult to grasp a single strand. Moreover, when one strand is pulled from the device, it would invariably drag one or more other strands in the same group along with it.
In the latter type of conventional separator, the strands in each group would also drape over one another and be relatively inaccessible. In addition, it would be difficult to withdraw the yarn strands without breaking them because the strands would all be resiliently clamped in place.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a yarn sorter for maintaining strands of yarn in selected groupings.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a yarn sorter which arranges the individual yarn strands of each group so that they are both visible and accessible.
A further object is to provide a sorter of this general type which dispenses yarn strands one at a time.